Two Retards Fighting

About

Two Retards Fighting is a viral reaction image of a YouTube thumbnail for a video titled "Two retards fighting," showing an image of two boys outside in what appears to be a backyard about to fight. The meme first appeared online in September 2019 and spread over the following years as a reaction image, an object-labeling format and a redraw meme.

Origin

The earliest known upload of the image was posted to the subreddit /r/ScottishFootball^[1] on September 22nd, 2019, and was used to represent a match between "Hibs vs. Hearts" (two Scottish Premiership football teams known as the Hearts and Hibernian), garnering over 650 upvotes in four years (shown below). It is unclear if the thumbnail is from a real video or not and cannot be found on YouTube.

Spread

The meme became increasingly popularized as a reaction image over the following years, also becoming notably prevalent in sports memes in which it was used to represent matches between two teams. For example, on June 20th, 2020, Instagram^[2] user aastonvillaa posted a meme using the image that gained over 4,600 likes in three years. On May 17th, 2021, a Redditor posted a version of the meme to /r/TNOmod^[3] that gained over 3,200 upvotes in two years (shown below).

On May 29th, 2022, a Redditor posted a version to /r/PoliticalCompassMemes^[4] that gained over 1,100 upvotes in a year (shown below, left). On June 17th, a Redditor posted a version to /r/PoliticalCompassMemes^[5] that gained over 800 upvotes in the same rough span of time (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References